EP390: The Power of Effective Workplace Communication in Achieving Goals

Stacy Jones: Welcome to marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. I’m Stacey Jones and I’m so happy to be here with you all today. And I want to give a very warm welcome to Gary Ross. Gary is a seasoned communication specialist with over 30 years of diverse experience. He’s currently the president of Insidecoms, a firm dedicated to enhancing workplace communication at every level of any organization. His expertise spans from being a former Fortune 500 corporate communications executive to an Emmy nominated broadcast journalist. His career is marked by influential positions at companies like CDW, Hyatt Hotels and Fortune brands. Additionally, he’s known for his insightful reporting during major events like category four, Hurricane Hugo and has worked extensively with the US military. Gary provides actual tips and advice that people can use to enhance their careers and build credibility and influence.

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Stacy Jones: Today, Gary and I are going to be discussing the intricacies of effective workplace communication and its impact on organizational success, common communication, challenges in the workplace, and strategies to overcome them. We’ll learn what works from Gary’s perspective, what should be avoided and how some miss the mark. Gary, welcome. So happy to have you here.

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Gary Ross: It’s great to be here, Stacey. Thanks.

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Stacy Jones: Of course. And what I always love doing, Gary, to start is you have had such a, I’m just going to say weathered career. It has been, I had to do it right. So you have had such an interesting career where you entered as a journalist and you were on broadcast television and then you went over into corporate communications and now you’re helping train and educate others. And I think that’s one of the best career path stories I’ve heard for connecting the dots. Because you learned what makes a good story at the very earliest of your career.

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Gary Ross: Yeah. And I use that today and it’s great to have that come, come full circle. And the skills you learn as a tv news reporter, you’re walking in the door every day, you don’t know what you’re going to be covering, but you’ve got to be enough of an expert at it by the 06:00 news to be able to go on for a minute and a half and tell people about it. And so being a trainer, working with, being a consultant, working with companies, taking information, distilling it from the complex into the simple, putting it all into the form of a story, those are the things that I continue to use throughout my career and what I work to help people with today.

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Stacy Jones: And so what made you take that leap? What was the transition you went into broadcast news, and you came out a corporate communication guy.

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Gary Ross: You make it sound like a magic car wash or something. And then I gotta go in one end, and I come out the other.

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Stacy Jones: Thing.

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Gary Ross: You know, I tell people that it was a fun job, and. But the career necessarily wasn’t for me, if that makes any sense. It was. I was. I worked in Charleston, South Carolina, which is a great city, and had a wonderful time for three years at that tv station there. And it became time to look for something else. And it became clear that I was going to need to move around the country several times, really, to kind of get to where I wanted to be. And the feeling of leaving Charleston, they wanted me to sign another three year contract there, but I wanted to move on. And the feeling of leaving there was really tough, and I didn’t want to keep experiencing that throughout my career, moving every two or three years.

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Gary Ross: So I decided to get into something where I knew I could use my skills and to help others, and I’d still be able to tell stories and. And communicate, and help people communicate on things. So that’s what I decided to do. I got into, originally, the media relations side of corporate communications. And then as I moved through my career and got more responsibility and started running communications departments, I really got interested in the. The internal communication piece, the workplace communication piece of things, because it’s. It’s an area where you can help the overall organization and the individuals, one by one, who are working in the organization at the same time. Because when you help them understand the meaning behind their work, how it connects into the overall goals of the organization, where they fit in, you help make sense of things.

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Gary Ross: When they’re going through a period of change or a period of turmoil, it helps them. When they’re sitting around the dinner table at night, talking to their families, helps them explain what they’re doing, it reduces stress. It enables them to become a better employee, better productivity, and that ultimately benefits the organization. So that’s really what gets me going about the internal and workplace communication side of things, is I can help the individuals walking in the door or cracking open their laptop every morning while helping the organization at the same time.

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Stacy Jones: And, you know, I have a firm belief that most people, I’d like to say everyone, but the majority of people, they want to do a good job, and they want to actually serve who they’re working with. They want recognition. And at the end of the day, they want to know that they actually move the needle for it. And I think that’s an honest expectation that most people have, most people that we’re all working with, that’s their belief system. Yet there’s so much strife at organizations very often where there’s that piece missing, where it becomes a, you know, the bosses are bad, the employees are bad, the someone like, and it all comes down to what you teach, and that is communication, because really, it’s not that the bosses are typically bad.

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Stacy Jones: It’s what they’re looking for and their objective and how they’re trying to get there. And they’re not necessarily sharing it the right way. And it’s not necessarily that the employees are bad. They’re just not understanding or not getting the tools. So when you’re working with people, I’m assuming this is a common thing that you.

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Gary Ross: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

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Stacy Jones: How do you, what’s the first steps that you work with your clients on mending that communication?

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Gary Ross: Well, we talk about communication, a lot of people. What also is very common is people feel that communication in their workplace could better, but they’re not entirely sure how to do it. They know that there’s an opportunity there, but they’re not really sure where to go. And so I focus on, there’s a few key areas that I like to stress with people, no matter whether it’s through consulting or through training that I’m doing and understanding, number one, that everything communicates. Even when you don’t communicate, you’re communicating, your actions communicate. Your degree of visibility in front of your team communicates. So sometimes very well meaning people say, well, I know I need to talk about something, but I’m not really quite ready to talk about it yet. I’ll talk about it next week.

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Gary Ross: And then next week they say, well, I’m not really ready for it yet. I’m going to talk about it next week and so on. Next thing you know, four weeks have gone by, and even as you, as a manager are thinking through this constructively and thoughtfully and trying to put together what you want to say, all the employees are hearing is absolute nothing. Radio silence. And so what happens when there’s no narrative or there’s no story that people are asked to follow, they start to make up the story in their own minds, and it’s never as good as the actual story that the organization or the manager wants to tell. So understanding that we’ve got to just be out there and communicate folks with folks, even if it’s to say, hey, we’re still working on it, we don’t have all the answers yet.

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Gary Ross: But we’re going to come to you, and we have answers available for you. So just understanding and being there for folks, being there to be able to answer questions is also very important. Also, understanding and knowing your audience well is absolutely crucial. And you may think, well, especially in a smaller organization, that you. Yeah, I know who my people are. I know what they like and so forth. It’s really drilling down and thinking, what is it that motivates them? What do they want from you? What do you want from them?

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Gary Ross: What is it that they need to hear and want to hear to do their jobs most effectively and really sitting down and thinking that through and understanding your audience is very important because ultimately you want to be able to communicate the right thing to the right people in the right way in the right time. So many times where we see people in organizations, they’re just out there kind of talking about something, and the people on the receiving end are, well, there’s nothing I can do with this. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Or they communicate about something three months early. So when it comes time for them to actually act on it, they’ve forgotten what they’ve already talked about before.

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Gary Ross: So understanding where people are, what their frame of reference is, what their point of view is, are they able to act on what it is that you want to communicate to them about. And that helps keep things relevant and shows people that they’re being understood. And then I go back to the part where we kind of alluded to earlier, also is telling people a story. And storytelling is as old as caveman drawings. That’s how people communicate with each other organically, to bring in that emotion, to drive, buy in, to get people connected. There’s something with our brain chemistry that when we’re exposed to some. Something in a. In a story, we get. We get drawn into it.

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Gary Ross: And so in the workplace, we’re not asking people to sit around campfires and roast marshmallows and tell stories, but we’re at where we suggest to folks, okay, think about what it is that you need to communicate and put it in the form of a story. And the way we do that is we ask ourselves four questions, where are we now? Where are we going? How will we get there? And what will it look like when we get there? So instead of telling people, hey, here’s something that’s happening, we’re moving our office from the suburbs to downtown. Here’s the date that it’s going to happen, and we expect you to be all ready for it by certain date, you tell a story about that move. Well, here we are. Now, we’re not close enough to.

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Gary Ross: As close to our clients as we need to be, and so we’ve decided to move. So that’s. Where are we now? Where are we going? We’re going to this brand new office downtown, closer to our customers. How will we get there? We’re going to support you every way we can, along with the move. And by the way, we’ll give you an introduction to the new neighborhood, and we’ll get your restaurant coupons and those sorts of things. And what will it look like when we get there? We’ll have a re energized office closer to our customers.

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Gary Ross: We’ll all be more financially successful, and our office will have a better place within our company because of the success that we’re going to have from this move, instead of just telling people what we’re going to do, and instead of that, put it in the form of a story, helps draw people in, helps bring people along, helps drive, buy in. If you think about that story structure, where are we now? Where are we going? How will we get there? What will it look like when we get there? That is the core story formula for a lot of the famous plays and movies and stories and books that we’ve read over time. Think about the wizard of Oz. Where are we now? We’re stuck in Oz. Where are we going? We’re off to see the wizard. How are we going to get there?

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Gary Ross: We’re going to follow the yellow brick road. And by the way, we’re going to get past all the winged monkeys and the wicked witch and all that. That’s where that conflict comes in. And then what will it look like when we get there? There’s no place like home. There’s that emotional pull at the end. So we can use these age old storytelling techniques in the workplace to really bring people along and have them follow us as leaders.

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Stacy Jones: That is making me think a lot, so I’m assuming it’s making our listeners think a lot, too. That’s a very different reframing. And I will tell you, we did exactly what you said, except that without the story, we’re like, we bought a building. We’re gonna move. You’re gonna be two blocks from the ocean, by the way. It’s another 15 minutes further commute.

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Gary Ross: Huh.

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Stacy Jones: That doesn’t always go over so well now that we’re here. Everyone’s great.

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Gary Ross: Everyone’s digging.

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Stacy Jones: Fantastic. They bought the vision. But, you know, that was two years of construction and time frames of team members going, one, are we really going to go? And two, I don’t know if we. I want to go. So that’s the difference in telling a story.

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Gary Ross: Well, I bet you couldn’t help yourself by telling a story at some point along the way because of, you know, your experience and what you did. So you probably frame things in the form of a story, maybe more than you, I guess, realized it.

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Stacy Jones: But we’re bringing in trainers to work out. Life is going to be grand. We’ll have a full kitchen. We can bring in lunches all the time.

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Gary Ross: There you go. Yeah, but you can. I mean, but even an office move or even just a new initiative at work, annual plan, a project plan, this is what we’re doing and here’s what it’s going to look like at the end, and here’s how we’re going to get there. And it’s going to be a journey, it’s going to be a quest. All those things that Star Wars, Shakespeare, all those classic stories through time have used, those elements, you can use them, too, at work and bring people along and get people psyched up and bought in and ready to go.

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Stacy Jones: And so when you’re looking at this, what are the first steps an organization to take? Where do they actually need to dive in to figure out how to do better, how to create stories, how to connect better with their teams, understanding that.

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Gary Ross: There are better ways to do things than perhaps they have in the past. There’s something weird about communication, or the topic of communication, I guess. And maybe you encounter this as a marketer, too. I suspect that maybe you have along the way is that a lot of people out there feel that they’re experts in it when perhaps they’re not. And it’s kind of a quirk of communication. I mean, you may not find that like an it or finance. You know, you don’t have people strolling into server rooms to reconfigure data centers because they feel that they’re it experts. But on the communication side of things, there are folks, I think sometimes that might think that they’ve got it all figured out. But there’s that lingering question, like I said before, that people feel like, I know our communication can better, how can we?

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Gary Ross: But they’re unclear how to do it. So I think the first step is understanding. Yeah, there are ways to improve this and there’s some strategy behind it. It’s not about sending out more emails or just creating a newsletter or having another meeting those certain things can be certainly part of a good communication plan, but that in and of itself, isn’t a communication plan or a strategy. It’s taking a step back and saying, what are the stories that we want to tell? What are the behaviors that we’re looking to drive? And then saying, okay, how can strategic communication support that?

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Gary Ross: And through the training that we do here, we help people frame that, but we also help people work together a little more on an interpersonal basis on doing things like having difficult conversations, understanding and learning how to write better in a professional way, removing things like filler words and so forth. So it’s taking that step back and realizing that. Yeah. That there are. Well, I may see myself as a good communicator, or I think that our organization itself communicates well. There are some things that we can. That we can do better, and perhaps somebody who is an expert in communication can help us.

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Stacy Jones: And I think that there’s very few people who could not use expertise in getting help, even if they’re really good at what they do. Right. Like, I was just having this conversation with another podcast guest, actually, when you’re inside. Like, I’m great at spinning. I’m good at pr. I can take and massage, and I can show you the wrong completely, or I can show you the right completely of any subject matter that you give me, including Elon Musk.

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Gary Ross: Doesn’t matter what it is.

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Stacy Jones: Right. Because it’s not about my passion to it, either. It’s just I can look at that, and I know how to spin and I know how to storytell, and I do well at that when it’s based on good, honest, fantastic things. But when you’re inside your own organization, sometimes it’s hard to see that forest through the trees that you’re looking at, where you are just so focused on what you know are your obstacles, and you’re so focused on how you want and you think people are perceiving you that it does sometimes take someone else to come in and shake it up a little bit and. Or at least to bounce ideas off of.

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Gary Ross: Yeah, absolutely. But sometimes people, or I think often people don’t realize, don’t think about communication as one of those things.

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Stacy Jones: Correct. And I would agree they might think.

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Gary Ross: About, like I said, yeah, they might think about it as one of those things. They might think about finance as one of those things. But communication is one of those things, too.

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Stacy Jones: Well, I mean, I think in today’s age, where there’s so much that’s online where, you know, we’re looking at our Facebook feed or Instagram feed or whatever feed, Google Ads. We’re reading digital. We’re doing all of this. There’s stories everywhere out there and brands who actually are able to construct a why and share their essence of who they are and the reasoning of what they’re doing and to the consumer, but also to their employees, that’s the big win. And if you’re not able to do that, if you’re not able to take those words that are not necessarily spun but thought of and used, well, it doesn’t make a brand. And for your employees, they’re buying into your brand of a company just as much as you’re hoping consumers buy into your brand or clients buy into your brand.

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Stacy Jones: If you’re an agency or a service provider.

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Gary Ross: Yeah. Oh, and so employees, people who work in an organization, they’re often, as we say, the best brand ambassadors, right? Because if they’re engaged, if they’re bought in, if they understand how they fit into the organization, they’re going out and having those conversations in real life or in, or on social, talking about where they work and talking it up. It’s also operationally important as well. And I remember a time a couple of years ago speaking with a group of advertising and PR students, and I was on a panel and I was representing internal communications, workplace communications. And there I could sense in the audience like, well, why is this guy here? You know, I’m not, I’m in advertising and pr and marketing. I’m not internal communications. And I said, well, you know, internal comms is important to what you do as a marketer, too.

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Gary Ross: How many times? Or we’re all familiar, rather, with this experience. We see an ad for something on tv or in a magazine or online, and here’s an offer, and we’ve got to go into the store to redeem it. And we go into that store and we find the employee, we ask the employee about this deal, and then what happens? They know absolutely nothing about what you’re talking about. And I said, that’s where internal comms and workplace comms comes in. When that person is more engaged, they’re going to want to be more up to date on what the external marketing is.

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Gary Ross: If our marketing folks and our internal comms folks are working well together, they’re making sure that the people out on the sales floor or the servers out on the restaurant floor or people in a manufacturing facility, for example, they’re all up to date on what’s happening in a, in the organization. So they know the latest and they’re able to do their jobs best and serve their customers best. So that’s why internal comms is important on the, you know, on the marketing side of things. And they’re like, oh, yeah, I get it. And I don’t know if I swayed anybody over onto internal comms that particular day, but we got them to see that certainly internally, and how you socialize things internally and how employees can live the brand and understand the brand and believe in the brand can make a huge difference.

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Stacy Jones: And so when we’re looking all this, what are common mistakes that people make along the way? Are they, what is it that you see time and time again people doing?

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Gary Ross: Not aligning with their folks and understanding. And not understanding that some of the things that we talked about earlier, that everything communicates. So when they’re not visible to their people or they’re going radio silent on things, they’re not understanding that people are making up their own stories as they’re going along. When an organization is going through change, for example, understanding that everybody deserves a chance to process that change, go through that change curve, but not everybody does it at the same time or in the same speed. So when executives think about a change and decide to launch it, they’ve already begun to process it. But the rest of the organization, they’re just beginning to process it and go through it.

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Gary Ross: And that’s where you see a lot of conflict when there’s change happening because the management doesn’t understand why the rest of the staff isn’t on board yet. Well, it’s because they haven’t had the time to process the change that, by the way, you had when you were deciding what the change was going to be and to approve it, and they deserve that chance to go through there. So making sure that there’s that understanding as well, and then just also being prescriptive about what you want folks actually to do. And this is not micromanaging or looking over people’s shoulder, but how many times have we all seen an email that goes something along the lines of, hey, we’re getting ready to close out the year. We’re a little bit behind our goals. So I need everybody to work hard and finish the year strong.

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Gary Ross: We’ve got the best team in the industry, and I know you can do it.

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Stacy Jones: Woohoo.

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Gary Ross: Woohoo.

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Stacy Jones: Right.

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Gary Ross: We’ve all seen that email, and you’ve been on the receiving end of that email, and it’s like, great, I’m in. What do I do? It didn’t say in the email what I’m supposed to do. And then I talked to my manager and said, well, what do I do? I want to finish the year strong. What do I do? And the manager kind of turns around and looks back at you and says, I don’t know. I got the same email you did. I guess it’s the same thing that we’ve always been doing. Well, if we do that, then we’re going to finish the year 5% behind where we need to because that’s where we are to begin with. So we’re very good at sometimes we’re very good in getting our people psyched up.

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Gary Ross: We get them to, or we understand what we want people to think, we understand what we want people to feel. But we’re, a lot of times we don’t follow through on what do we actually need to do? Do we actually need to have more meetings with potential customers? Do we need to revise our plans? Do we need to look at our sales goals a little differently, whatever it is, what specifically do we need to do? And by really following through on that last and final step, that can help drive the action. We’ve already done the hard part about getting people on board and motivating folks, but if we’re not clear on what we actually want people to do is not going to get done, no matter how rah and inspiring we are.

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Stacy Jones: And so with that, instead of doing exactly, hey, let’s finish our goals ahead of time. Rah, rah, rah. Would you suggest that you build out tangible, doable goals, steps, processes?

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Gary Ross: Yeah. Yeah.

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Stacy Jones: You add on to that we’re going to do.

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Gary Ross: Yes, you add on to that email. Here are three things you can do now. Boom, boom. And. And talk to your manager about how you can do those things. And ideally, there is also a separate communication to those managers that says, we’re about to fire your people up to get them going for the rest of the year, we’re going to ask them to do these three things, and we’d like your support in doing that and think about how you can support your people in doing those three things. So we’re very clear about what it is we want people to do and that construct, that think, feel, do construct. What do we want people to think? What do we want people to feel, and what do we ultimately want people to do?

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Gary Ross: That’s a good way to think about really any communication, whether it’s that year end rah, exceed our goals communication. It could be a one one that you’re about to have with somebody. It could be a regular staff meeting, a presentation, what have you. What do you want people to think, feel, and do what? And don’t leave off that last part. What do we want people to do? What’s the action we want people to take? That all has to do with two, and this is kind of a mistake. Also, I think in communication, sometimes we think, oh, gosh, there’s so much going on and we need people do stuff.

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Gary Ross: I need to communicate, and I send out an email or I have a meeting or what have you, and it makes me feel better that, okay, well, I’ve communicated something, but it’s kind of like throwing spaghetti on the wall, right? Thinking about, when you’re thinking about communicating, what is your communication objective? What’s its job? What do you want your communication to accomplish that will then help you hone in on that think, feel, do piece and say, all right, at the end of this, by the time I’ve communicated, I want people to understand that I want them to do a, b, and c, and then hopefully in the next week, two weeks, month, whatever timeframe that I’ll start seeing some results there.

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Gary Ross: Same thing happens when we’ve all been in organizations where we have that mid year meeting because we feel like we need to have a mid year meeting, and we’ve always had a mid year meeting and it’s time to do a mid year meeting because it’s the middle of the year. So we all go for a day and a half, and we sit and we have the midyear meeting, and we see people get up there and they show their presentations that we’ve probably already seen in other meetings because nobody has time to put together presentations for that particular meeting. And then you’ve spent a day and a half kind of all talking to each other, and we’re walking out saying, well, it was nice seeing you, but well, what? Why were we here? If you’re going to have a meeting like that, have an objective.

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Gary Ross: What is the meeting’s objective? What do we want it to accomplish? What is its job? By the end of this meeting, I want people to do these one, two, or three things or be equipped to do those one, two or three things. And by doing that, you will have created an effective piece of communication. And by the way, not wasted your.

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Stacy Jones: People’S time because that happens a lot. There’s a lot of time that’s wasted.

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Gary Ross: Yeah. And so it’s thinking about these things and just, again, going back to the fact that, well, you know, why we have the mid year meeting and why do we have it? Well, because it was, they were doing it for ten years before I got here. And it’s something we always do, so we do it well. That’s not the reason to have a meeting and thinking, and if you’re getting a little bit lost about, well, why is this? Why am I not seeing the behavior? Why am I not seeing the action that we need?

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Gary Ross: That’s a pretty good hint that there’s a communication piece that could be improved upon and we can help you see those things and help train your folks to help them with their teams as well to improve that and help avoid that feeling that, you know, that something can be improved.

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Stacy Jones: And so on that note, it’s a fantastic time to say how can people find you in this world of online?

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Gary Ross: In the world of online, we are at www.insidecoms.com inside. And then we’ve also got eleven elearning courses online as well that communicators actually take. But they’re also good for folks who aren’t necessarily in communications on things like writing professionally, communicating bad news, how to run an event, some of those topics, those courses, you can get to it through that website or directly at plus dot insidecoms.com. Our e learning is called inside coms plus. So that’s where that comes from. And those courses are online if we’ve got deep discounts, if you’d like your teams to take those courses. Some of the work that I do, for example, I have a client, I’m part of their learning and development university where I teach live on communications, either in person and virtually.

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Gary Ross: And they’ve also purchased several of the elearning courses that they’ve made available to their entire company. So that’s something that we can work with you on, especially on the pricing on that.

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Stacy Jones: Okay. And are there any other tidbits that you could share that before people reach out to you and sign up for all of your courses that you could give as parting words of advice?

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Gary Ross: So again, think about framing things in the form of a story. Be clear on what you’re looking for people to do. What is the job of your communication? Why are you communicating in the first place? Understand your audience and what motivates them and making sure that the things that you’re communicating to them that they’re able to act upon so it’s meaningful for them. And if you’ve got a feeling that communication can better, but you’re not quite, you don’t quite see how that might be. Give us a, give us a ring and we can help you sort through that.

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Stacy Jones: Well, I’ll have to say, you were brilliant. Thank you for lending all of your insights. That was fantastic.

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Gary Ross: Gary, that was great to be here. Thank you. I appreciate it.

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Stacy Jones: Of course. And to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning into another episode of marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. I look forward to chatting with you this next week. And until then, if you have any questions on how to communicate your brand in the movies or tv shows or on the red carpet, reach out to my agency, Hollywood branded. Love to chat with you more and we can talk. And until then, have a great one.